What is Collective Impact?

What is collective impact?

Collective Impact is a collaborative strategy between multiple stakeholders (like non-profits, public agencies, governments, and businesses) for solving complex social problems. In contrast to traditional approaches where organizations pursue their goals in isolation, collective impact encourages these diverse groups to coordinate their activities around commonly agreed-upon goals.

The term was first proposed by Kania and Kramer (2011), who profiled the impressive success of an Cincinnati educational organization called Strive. There are five conditions characteristic of successful collective impact initiatives, outlined below.

There is agreement on how data is measured, what will be measured, and how success is determined in the short, medium, and long term. This builds accountability and promotes learning from successes and failures.

An independent organization and staff provides administrative support to push the agenda forward, facilitate collaboration and communication between actors/agencies, and project/data management as needed.

As a result of Collective Impact programs, new programs were developed, existing programs were expanded, or there were state and organizational changes that enabled greater leverage from existing community resources to advance the agenda.

Shared vision, mutually reinforcing activities, and multi-sectoral partnerships were particularly important across the types of issues initiatives were meant to address.

While Collective Impact can impact outcomes directly, in some cases, it supported and helped to drive forward other efforts (such as increased funding, changes to local planning, etc.), rather than causing change directly.

Initiatives that were more successful in measurably changing their issue focused on cultivating backbone support and developing a common agenda. While all of the five components of Collective Impact initiatives were implemented in most successful initiatives, these were the most fully developed.

While equity does not guarantee a positive impact/outcome on the issue in focus, there was a notable trend toward success when initiatives emphasized equity and took active steps to emphasize equity in their practices (specifically, inclusion of context experts, micro-targeting communities, and building capacity).